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How Mind Wandering Boosts Your Creativity
Do your best ideas ever come to you in the shower? Or when you’re taking a walk in the park? People frequently claim that a creative insight or inspirational thought came to them while they were away from their work desks, often during a moment of relaxation or even during a dream. Mary Shelley’s idea for Frankenstein purportedly came to her in a dream at Lord Byron’s villa, and biographers for the Beatles explain that Paul McCartney envisioned the melody for Yesterday while he slept at his girlfriend’s home.
These claims often sound like apocryphal stories, because it’s reasonable to expect that your strongest outputs should come from hard work rather than blind luck. However, as we learn more about the science of the brain and mind, the creative value of taking breaks becomes clearer.
When we relax, our mind is likely to wander. At our desk, we typically stare at a computer screen and focus carefully on one particular problem. In fact, we often focus on one limited aspect of the problem. A narrow focus of attention filters out distractions, and keeps us on a single consistent train of thought. But when we have a problem that requires us to bring together several different perspectives, or requires us to visualize a problem from an unusual point of view, tunnel vision is not necessarily a good thing. Instead, that’s when a wandering mind may be…
